UC Native Americans demand action against scholars claiming Indigenous roots without proof

For years, Maylei Blackwell has worked to lift up Indigenous and Chicana women’s voices as a UCLA professor who identified as a mixed-race person of Thai and Cherokee heritage. Her research was widely cited, her use of oral histories praised. Her most recent book was poised to receive a prestigious award last year from a Native American and Indigenous studies association.

Then came a bombshell revelation.

The scholars association abruptly rescinded the award after allegations surfaced last spring that Blackwell’s claims of Cherokee heritage, based on family stories, were phony. In a public apology, Blackwell confessed that her research triggered by the allegations found her mother was white. She vowed to seek repair for harms caused. The furor reverberated nationally after Charlene Villaseñor Black, chair of Blackwell’s Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, posted a public message of gratitude to the Indigenous scholars who brought the issue to light.

Now the University of California, following several cases of questioned Native American identity over the last few years, has launched a “fact-finding mission” on the issue, according to UC Academic Senate Chair Steven W. Cheung. UC provided no details on the scope of the effort. But the action comes after UC Native American scholars held their first symposium last year on what they say is a growing problem of what are called “Pretendians” — pretend Indians — in the UC system and across academia nationwide.

“We just decided that people need to start talking about this in the system or it’s going to keep happening,” said Phenocia Bauerle, UC Berkeley director of Native American Student Development, who has helped lead efforts for action. “There are so many people pretending to be Native, so I do think people who are claiming it, who are building their careers on it, should have to prove it.”

In the last few years, the Pretendian issue has surfaced at UC Riverside, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and UCLA; complaints have also been raised against faculty who pursued graduate studies or postdoctoral fellowships at these campuses along with UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis.

Critics say that Pretendians potentially take grants, jobs, speaking platforms and other benefits from Native Americans. Their exposure often wreaks personal and professional harm on their students, whose associations with a now-tainted mentor can jeopardize their academic careers.

Pretendians may also be committing academic dishonesty if their claims of Indigeneity serve as passports for access to sacred ceremonies, or intimate stories offered by trusting community members who believe the researcher shares their Native American experiences and understandings, Bauerle and others said.

Bauerle and other UC scholars are compiling recommendations for actions — which could include improving data collection on tribal affiliations of faculty — and hope to complete them by May. Others say confirmed Pretendians should be reviewed for possible academic sanctions or be required to return grants or other benefits obtained under false pretenses.

Jim Steintrager, who served as UC Academic Senate chair at the time of the symposium last year, said such cases could raise questions about research integrity, and more systemwide guidance on how to handle them could be helpful.

Blackwell, for instance, received a two-year $200,000 UC award last spring to train Indigenous women in Mexico as digital archivists. A spokesman for UC Riverside, which administers the systemwide grant, said the campus and program first learned about Blackwell’s heritage issues from The Times last November but was “currently unaware of any sanctions that would impact her eligibility for awards.”

Blackwell, in written responses to questions from The Times, said she accepted the grant last May, before she learned about her true ancestry. She said she shared the revelation and her apology with the Indigenous women involved in the project and they all said they wanted to continue working with her. But Blackwell said she is meeting with UCLA leaders to “find a way to step away from the grant” without taking away the funding needed by the Indigenous women or the graduate student on the project.

She said the narrative around her — a white woman who assumed a Native American identity to acquire resources or access — does not reflect the motivations behind her work for social justice. Her academic interests are based not on an imagined Cherokee identity, but as the child of an unmarried interracial couple who was bullied and stigmatized for her race, gender and sex. She said she chose to specialize in Indigeneity in the Latina community after being drawn to powerful Chicana activists, whose stories and struggles inspired her first book, “¡Chicana Power!”

“I have helped to build a field and fought for a world and an academy where more Indigenous people and people of color fit and can have their voices heard,” Blackwell told The Times. “If I have taken up spaces that were not mine in the process, I deeply apologize and commit to work to repair the harm I have done.”

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She also said she wants to heal her intergenerational family trauma — a history of alcoholism and violence — that she believes created conditions for her mother’s falsehoods, which made her feel betrayed when revealed.

More than 20 UCLA graduate students have expressed outrage and called on Blackwell to resign, saying in an anonymous collective statement last year that her deception went beyond personal betrayal but also contributed to a “broader colonial project to erase and commodify Indigenous identity.” Black, the department chair, told The Times she publicly spoke out about the case and stood against the ensuing backlash to “do the right thing” for the Native American community in the name of social justice that the department was founded on three decades ago.

Others, however, supported Blackwell.

“Professor Blackwell’s scholarship and teaching have undergone rigorous peer review, and she is a valuable faculty member at UCLA and in many different community spaces related to her research,” Abel Valenzuela, Dean of UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences in UCLA College, said in a statement to The Times. “In light of this unfortunate situation, we are committed to working with Professor Blackwell, along with campus and department leadership, to find a thoughtful, amicable, and restorative path forward.”

Indigenous leaders say Pretendians harm more than individuals. Self-identification as Native American also flouts the sovereign right of tribes to determine rules for citizenship. The three federally recognized Cherokee tribes, for instance, require members to be direct descendants of tribal citizens listed on specific federal census rolls; two also require a certain percentage of “Indian blood” based on verifiable family trees.

Such rules are sometimes criticized as gatekeeping at odds with values of inclusion.

But tribal citizenship is a political status that can only be conferred by self-governing tribal nations, said Kim Tallbear, a professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta who studied and taught at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. Those distinctions are often misunderstood in universities, which typically regard Native American identity as a private matter or a category of race and ethnicity, she said.

Tallbear estimated that possibly a quarter of university faculty, staff and students across the nation who claim Indigenous backgrounds can’t prove it.

According to a 2018 UC report, only 30% of UC undergraduates enrolled that year who self-identified as Native Americans or Alaska Natives specified their federally- or state-recognized tribe. The report raised questions about the reliability of UC enrollment data and whether fraud was occurring — prompting Bauerle and other Native American leaders to work with UC to include more precise questions about tribal affiliation on applications beginning in 2022.

The UC’s Native American scholarship program requires applicants to specify membership in a federally recognized tribe — a political classification that is not subject to state bans on preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.

But candidates for faculty positions are not generally questioned about their Native affiliation. While that may not be relevant to a position in computer science or medieval literature, many Indigenous scholars said it matters greatly for jobs in Native American studies or other related fields.

UC Riverside, for instance, hired Allison Hedge Coke in 2016 as a distinguished professor of creative writing under an initiative to expand faculty positions in Indigenous Studies along with several other priority areas. She described learning family stories about Cherokee, Huron and Creek heritage in a 2004 memoir that was part of a book series on American Indian lives. Those claims have been challenged by Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, a nonprofit that investigated her background and published a genealogical chart dating back seven generations to 1712 showing no Indian ancestors.

The UC Riverside scholar is “a white woman who has built her career with a fantastical ‘Native’ identity that no one in her family has ever possessed,” the group posted. “Thus, her entire education is predicated on a fraud.”

Hedge Coke did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Steve Erickson, chair of her creative writing department who arrived after she was hired, said he first learned about the contested identity issues from The Times last fall. It does not appear that UCR asked Hedge Coke, who remains at the university, to verify her claims of Native American heritage when hiring her.

“The University is unaware of any state or federal law that requires prospective or current employees to provide evidence of their racial or ethnic heritage, and does not ask for such evidence,” said John Warren, UCR spokesman.

However, UCR negotiated a separation settlement in 2023 with another professor — Andrea Smith, an ethnic studies professor and leading voice on Indigenous feminism — after 13 professors alleged she made “fraudulent claims to Native American identity,” in violation of academic integrity. Smith denied the allegations in the agreement, but the two sides settled to avoid costly litigation.

Questions have also been raised by Native American scholars and the anti-fraud Tribal Alliance nonprofit about Alicia Carroll, a UC Irvine associate professor of comparative literature who has taught courses in Native American and Indigenous literature and culture and has been active in the Cherokee Community of the Inland Empire.

Carroll has said they are a Cherokee but not a citizen in a federally recognized tribe — a position the Cherokee Nation and Cherokee scholars say is not allowed under tribal criteria that requires those who claim their heritage to meet citizenship requirements.

The Tribal Alliance published a genealogical chart showing Carroll did not have Indian ancestors. Carroll said the alliance’s work was rife with errors. In an interview with The Times, the scholar said they have “a multi-generational family history of Cherokee identity.” They declined to elaborate, telling The Times, “I don’t think I need to give you my family story. That’s mine.”

In a UCI article last December, Carroll said their mother shared childhood memories of a Cherokee grandfather who passed on cultural knowledge and practices and said “know yourself as a Cherokee.” The article has been taken down.

Carroll also said Cherokee Nation Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. and other Cherokee leaders supported them. “I took personal phone calls from several Cherokee Nation elected officials, all of whom confirmed that I’m a valued member of the Cherokee community and urged me to continue my community service and participation,” Carroll said.

The Cherokee Nation clarified its position in a statement to The Times.

“Cherokee Nation and Chief Hoskin recognize that many individuals of good faith are on a journey to explore their family roots, and we support them in that exploration, but we discourage them from claiming to be ‘Cherokee’ unless and until they establish citizenship or membership,” the statement said. “Any claim that Chief Hoskin condones individuals or organizations claiming Cherokee identity for personal or organizational profit is false.”

Tallbear, Bauerle and other Native American scholars said they hope UC and other U.S. universities can adopt practices of transparency over tribal identity used in a growing number of Canadian institutions. More are verifying heritage claims if they are germane to jobs, scholarships and other benefits.

The University of Minnesota, in a move hailed by Native American leaders, last fall asked for a “statement of connection to the Indigenous community” for two faculty positions in American Indian and Indigenous Studies. David Aiona Chang, chair of the university’s Department of American Indian Studies, stressed the statement was not about Native American identity, but connections because they are “important in the community-oriented work we do.”

But most U.S. universities are still generally reluctant to step into the fraught arena, Tallbear said.

“Let’s stop with the denialism,” Tallbear said. “Understand that this conversation needs to be held as difficult as it is.”